I have
been reading a fascinating account of Alexander McCall-Smith and his prestigious
literary output. In particular he wrote an episode of Colduroy Road as an
on-line serial at the rate of one chapter per day. What a brilliant idea.
Prologue
When I
was a lot younger I had a loop of film stuck inside my head. It only ran when I
was asleep, which is why I was unable to control it. The images were always the
same: vivid Technicolour scenes that ran again and again.
I
was driving my dad’s vintage Buick Skylark on Interstate 405 west of LA. Most
times it was the busiest highway in the US, but the traffic was unusually light
on that hot summer evening and I was driving fast. Much too fast. My high
school date was laughing. Her long golden hair billowed out behind her. She
looked at me with eyes all aglow, like she’d never had such a good time. Then
she glanced ahead and her face changed. Her eyes were suddenly filled with a
look of horror.
She
screamed.
I
followed her gaze and caught just a glimpse of a truck pulling out from an
on-ramp. We were almost upon it, too close to stop. That was when the film
jammed. Everything froze except the intense sense of horror. And that went on
and on.
I
used to wake up in a cold sweat. Screaming. Always a cold sweat. Always
screaming. In the harsh light of day, when I was fully awake, I would remember the
rest of it. Especially those last few moments. How could anyone forget?
The
girl was called Carrie-Ann. I loved her and I thought we would have a good life
together after we graduated. She was buried by the time I got out of hospital,
but her memory stayed with me a long time. Her parents never spoke to me again.
Who could blame them? I killed their daughter.
“It
was the trucker’s fault,” my dad kept telling me. “He was high on booze. Wasn’t
paying attention.”
But
dad knew the truth. It was me—I was
to blame.
A
few years later, when I’d grown up a bit and the nightmares had started to fade,
I joined the US air force. They taught me how to fly. More than that, they
taught me how to bomb the enemies of Uncle Sam. They also taught me to deal
with any other miserable boneheads who weren’t actually a threat to the US but
deserved to be taken out. I practised what they taught me and then I went into
action over Iraq in a B52. That was 1991, at the start of the First Gulf War. Operation
Desert Storm. I dropped bombs on the enemy, killing them in cold blood. My CO
said I was good at it. At first I never felt guilty about it, never suffered a single
nightmare because war was different. It was a remote sort of killing. I never
got to see the victims and, besides, I figured the other side deserved all we
threw at them. It never occurred to me that casualties of war included innocent
kids.
I
might have gone on like that but a couple of years later I saw what bombing did
to innocent victims on the ground in a place called Bosnia. That film rolled
again inside my head and I guess I just cracked up. The past caught up with the
present and I realised I’d been wrong all along. War wasn’t different at all.
Killing was killing. In a pique of arrogance I said I wasn’t going to shoot or
bomb anyone ever again. I guess I must have over-stepped the limits because the
air force decided to get rid of me. In the long, painful days that followed, the
memory of Carrie-Ann often came back to haunt me.
And
then, one day, things got one whole lot worse.
To be continued
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